You’re probably wondering what the classic cue for a film take has to do with DevOps. Well in fact there are many similarities between it and continuous software delivery. But before we go into movie making let’s set the stage. The emergence of big data, cloud and mobility to address today's business challenges is driving a proliferation of new applications on top of the core business applications from vendors such as SAP, Microsoft and Oracle. As a consequence, IT environments are becoming much more complex, more diverse, delivered across multiple form factors … and they are becoming even more interconnected and interdependent.

Now, DevOps plays a critical role in addressing the execution gap between the innovation seekers and those delivering the application innovation. It’s imperative to resolve this gap when you consider that nearly 50%of applications are rolled back after they are released to production. This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that minor code changes can takeseveral weeks to be released to customers.

The good news is that IBM has developed a blueprint for continuous delivery of software innovation that helps resolve the execution gap. This is achieved by expanding the traditional notion of DevOps to unite customers, business owners and IT teams (development and operations) in a continuous feedback loop that balances quality, cost and speed. The result is higher productivity, quicker time to value and happier customers.

Lights

Looking under the DevOps covers you’ll see that lights are critical for continuous software delivery. These lights enable the developer to determine what is needed on the set prior to application deployment – essentially establishing the underlying environment.

With Continuous Release & Deployment, developers can request an application environment from the service catalog and provision and configure the servers and middleware to automate deployments and manage releases for test and production.

Camera

So the lights are turned on but you now need a camera to see the entire stage and zoom in on certain aspects of the set. The problem is that not all cameras are created equally and many don’t have the right lenses to provide both a micro and macro view of the environment. Similarly, many organizations today are managing their mission-critical applications in a fragmented manner with highly customized management solutions which lack automation and visibility across the complex landscape. The impact of a fragmented, incomplete service management strategy is staggering. Organizations are unable to assure service levels which leads to significant business disruptions that manifest themselves in multiple ways including lost revenue, customer dissatisfaction, and compliance/regulatory issues.

By driving visibility across the stage, organizations are able to truly transform their business and provide Continuous Monitoring across their entire infrastructure. Developer and IT operations teams are able to better understand the performance and availability of their applications and early feedback lowers cost of errors and change, and helps steer projects toward successful completion.

Action

The lights are shining, the camera is turned on and the director yells out action! Scene 1 is taking place but the director notices that the lead actor just screwed up one word of his first line. Or perhaps one of the stage props fell during the shoot. No problem….the prop is reset, the actor gets his lines right and take 2 is successful.

In the DevOps domain, Continuous Feedback and Optimization is embedded into the structure so that problems are resolved fast and customer expectations are met. Collaborative incident management enables operations teams to check the status of defects affecting production, and to instantly notify development teams of problems found in production for faster resolution.

DevOps enables organizations to seize new market opportunities by quickly and efficiently deploying software innovation. This is achieved by embedding lights, camera and action into the architecture ie continuous deployment, monitoring and optimization. This continuous feedback loop helps drive quicker time to value of software and higher quality which in turn translates to improved customer satisfaction.

TUC Webcast:
A Control Center for Next Generation IT Asset and Service Management
Please join the Tivoli User Community for a live Webcast
and opportunity for Q&A, Tuesday, April 9, 2013 at 11:00 AM ET USA and 6:00
PM ET USA.

The Official Tivoli User Community is the
largest online and offline organization of Tivoli professionals in the world –
home to over 160 local User Communities and dozens of virtual/global groups
from 29 countries – with more than 26,000 members. The TUC community
offers Users blogs and forums for discussion and collaboration, access to the
latest whitepapers, webinars, presentations and research for Users, by Users
and the latest information on Tivoli products. The Tivoli User Community
offers the opportunity to learn and collaborate on the latest topics and issues
that matter most. Membership is complimentary. Join NOW!

Challenges with virtualized environments are driving the shift to
increased integration of service management capabilities such as image
and patch management, high-scale provisioning, monitoring, storage and
security. In this webcast, learn how organizations can realize the full
benefits of virtualization including reduced management costs, decreased
deployment time, increased visibility into performance and maximized
utilization.

Matt Rodkey is a Product Manager focusing on Tivoli Cloud Solutions.
In 13 years with IBM, Matt has worked in a number of areas in the Tivoli
portfolio including Security, Monitoring, and Service Delivery.

The Official Tivoli User Community is the largest online and offline
organization of Tivoli professionals in the world – home to over 160 local User
Communities and dozens of virtual/global groups from 29 countries – with more
than 26,000 members. The TUC community offers Users blogs and forums for
discussion and collaboration, access to the latest whitepapers, webinars,
presentations and research for Users, by Users and the latest information on
Tivoli products. The Tivoli User Community offers the opportunity to
learn and collaborate on the latest topics and issues that matter most.
Membership is complimentary. Join NOW!

This Webcast will introduce the Top 5 reasons TUC members should
check out the Jazz for Service Management beta. The webcast will include
a realtime, live demonstration of Jazz for Service Management, showcasing the
value of linked data for simplifying integration across existing multivendor
tools. It will also preview integration of IBM Tivoli Monitoring, Tivoli
Application Dependency Discovery Manager, SmartCloud Control Desk, Tivoli
Business Service Manager, and Omnibus.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

John Dinger is a Distinguished Engineer with IBM, focusing on Tivoli
product development since 1999. John has worked in the field of management
solutions and networking protocol development for over 30 years. His teams have
built and delivered management products and solutions for Telecommunications
and traditional Enterprise clients.

Christopher Lazzarois the chief programmer of Jazz for Service
Management.In this role, he leads the
implementation of the services, and helps drive the cross product integration
strategy at Tivoli.

The Official Tivoli User Community is the largest online and offline
organization of Tivoli professionals in the world – home to over 160 local User
Communities and dozens of virtual/global groups from 29 countries – with more
than 26,000 members. The TUC community offers Users blogs and forums for
discussion and collaboration, access to the latest whitepapers, webinars,
presentations and research for Users, by Users and the latest information on
Tivoli products. The Tivoli User Community offers the opportunity to
learn and collaborate on the latest topics and issues that matter most.
Membership is complimentary. Join NOW!

Overview:While virtualization can produce significant cost savings as a result of
reducing infrastructure overhead, it does not address the single-largest cost
element for most data centers—the labor to manage this environment—which can be
as high as 40 percent of the overall cost. If not controlled, management costs
can negate the cost savings realized through virtualization. Virtualization
enables mobility of systems and flexible deployment and re-deployment of
systems. Manually tracking software stacks and configurations of VMs and images
becomes increasingly difficult and there is a need for provisioning automation

In this
webcast, learn how to accelerate application deployment and increase business
agility by leveraging virtualization and building simple, scalable cloud.

Matt
Rodkey is a Product Manager focusing on Tivoli Cloud Solutions.In 13 years with IBM, Matt has worked in a
number of areas in the Tivoli portfolio including Security, Monitoring, and
Service Delivery. Click Here to view his TUC Profile

The
Official Tivoli User Community is the largest online and offline organization
of Tivoli professionals in the world – home to over 160 local User Communities
and dozens of virtual/global groups from 29 countries – with more than 26,000
members.The TUC community offers Users
blogs and forums for discussion and collaboration, access to the latest
whitepapers, webinars, presentations and research for Users, by Users and the
latest information on Tivoli products.The Tivoli User Community offers the opportunity to learn and
collaborate on the latest topics and issues that matter most.Membership is complimentary.Join NOW!

The benefits of virtualization,
have spurred many organizations to move toward a virtual infrastructure. While
these organizations enjoy accelerated service delivery and resource
optimization to reduced costs for IT resources, they have also frequently experienced
a new set of management complexities. The nature of the virtual environment,
which calls for a vast network of shared resources is best handled with
cloud-computing capabilities on the virtualized infrastructure. In this webcast, the IBM team will address the complexities head
on by learning to increase your ROI from your current virtualized
infrastructure by building the workload optimized cloud.

About The Speaker: Shawn Jaques, Program Manager IBM SmartCloud Foundation

Shawn Jaques is a
program manager in IBM marketing focused on technical marketing of the IBM
SmartCloud Foundation portfolio.Prior
to this role, Shawn led the Tivoli Cloud product management and strategy team,
responsible for identifying market opportunities and setting cloud product and
portfolio direction.Shawn's prior
experience includes numerous product management, market management and strategy
roles within IBM as well as consulting and financial auditing for other
firms.Shawn has a Master of Business
Administration from The University of Texas at Austin and a Bachelor of Science
from the University of Montana.He lives
in Boulder, Colorado and is a fitness and outdoor enthusiast.

The
Official Tivoli User Community is the largest online and offline
organization of Tivoli professionals in the world – home to over 160 local User
Communities and dozens of virtual/global groups from 29 countries – with more
than 26,000 members. The TUC community offers Users blogs and forums for
discussion and collaboration, access to the latest whitepapers, webinars, presentations
and research for Users, by Users and the latest information on Tivoli
products. The Tivoli User Community offers the opportunity to learn and
collaborate on the latest topics and issues that matter most. Membership
is complimentary. Join
NOW!

How do I find out if my warehouse has all the tables/views needed to run a report or create a custom report?

A new set of reports have been added under the folder "Prerequisites
Checking" in ITMfVE 7.1 for the VMware VI agent which provide you with a
prerequisite scanner that checks if the list of all tables/views needed
to run the predefined reports and the ones needed to support custom
reporting are available in the Tivoli Data Warehouse. It also checks the
VMware VI agent version and lets you know if the available version is
up-to-date or not. The reports also point you to appropriate
documentation which can be helpful in enabling historical collection and
summarization and pruning, creating IBM_TRAM schema, Time Dimension and
other shared dimensions like WEEKDAY_LOOKUP, MONTH_LOOKUP and
ComputerSystem and populating Time dimension. In addition to this, the
report also provides the list of attribute groups for the VMware VI
agent to guide the users while enabling historical collection.

Please note that in spite of having all the prerequisite tables/views
in the Tivoli Data Warehouse, you may not be able to run the reports [Continue Reading]

ITM for Virtual Environments provides out-of-the-box pages in TIP (Tivoli Integrated Portal) that display well on a standard screen size of 1280 by 1024 pixels. If you use a higher screen resolution, you can customize the TIP pages to better suit your screen. Additionally, you can rearrange the components on a TIP page if you prefer that certain widgets are shown on a certain portion of the page. Let's examine both of these customizations.

Let's go through an example where we use a screen resolution of 1600 by 900 pixels, to see how we can change an ITM for Virtual Environments page to use the full screen real estate. Initially, when you pull up the ITMfVE VMware Cluster Dashboard, it looks like the following:

When we collapse the navigation tree in the view above, it then looks like:

For our particular screen resolution (1600 x 900), this is not optimal. However, we can easily modify the screen above to look like:

We are happy to announce that a Beta program is underway for the Tivoli Virtual Deployment Engine (VDE), also known as High Scale Low Touch (HSLT).

VDE will provide a low-cost, easy to implement cloud solution to fulfil demand for rapid deployment of virtual machines and storage in high or low volume environments with massive scalability, high resiliency and low management costs. It's been in development for a number of months and is now ready for wider trials with our customers. Those who have witnessed it first hand are highly impressed with the speed of deployment and the fast time-to-value.

The main features of this exciting new capability are:

- Quick deployment times of VM and storage - even for thousands of virtual images, eg:

Hours/days to install instead of weeks/months

Ability to deploy a running VM in less than 30 seconds

Ability to handle high volumes of VM requests -- over 4,000 per hour

Update/Upgrades with zero downtime

- Low overhead approaches to image instantiation, recovery and management - Self-service feature to give end users easy and fast access to the virtual components they require- Distributed design avoids single point of failure. Recovery from failures is automatic and immediate, not manual and time-consuming- Reduced administration and maintenance effort

You can now download and deploy the Beta code in your own test environment, and see for yourself.

Design presentations, demonstrations and documentation are all available on our Discussion Forum, which all participants will be given access to. As well as giving you direct contact with the Development team, the Forum also gives you the opportunity to connect with our other participating customers and business partners.

Beta Programs give you an unrivalled opportunity to influence the direction of products so that they suit the way you do business, and to try new or updated solutions in your own environment free of charge.

If you would like to join the Beta program or simply want more information, please contact the Beta Manager, Valory Batchellor (valory_batchellor@uk.ibm.com)

The Tivoli User Community (TUC) has a second quarter Community Focus on Cloud and Virtualization.

It's a great time to check out the TUC and collaborate with some of the other 27,000 Tivoli Users. There may even be a local User Group in your area; there are more than 160 local groups world wide as well as ten virtual user groups, grouped by product focus areas.

Each quarter the TUC reaches far and wide to bring together many different view points, presentations, and "experts on tap" to discuss a hot topic that the members have voted on.

This month's topic is right in line with YOUR area of interest, Cloud and Virtualization.click here for a full portal of Resources about these topics including: